


the art of scraping through

by acezukos (purplefennels7)



Series: abby does fleet week 2k20 [2]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Grief/Mourning, Growing Up, M/M, and the life long friendship, it's about the shared personal trauma, the inherent trauma of living through a war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:35:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25573693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purplefennels7/pseuds/acezukos
Summary: It starts with broken arms, in a time when the war is spoken about only in whispers. The war will come to them, though, before it is over, and the only thing left is to hold on to what you love.“Maybe the war will end. Before we need to go.”“Maybe.”
Relationships: Bato/Hakoda (Avatar), mentions of Hakoda/Kya
Series: abby does fleet week 2k20 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1851535
Comments: 23
Kudos: 88
Collections: Bakoda Fleet Week 2020





	the art of scraping through

**Author's Note:**

> hey again welcome back to the "abby tries to write short fics and fails" challenge ksljslj i definitely tried to take on far too long of a period of time but you know...it's about the life long friendship. 
> 
> title from "someone new" by hozier (yes, again)

Hakoda breaks his arm for the first time when he’s thirteen, falling from the mast of his father’s boat after his rigging knot proves a little too haphazard to support his weight. The war is a distant specter then, something that the adults talk about in low voices over the last embers of dying fires, and there are still enough waterbenders that there is one aboard. He comes away from the incident looking none the worse for wear except for a bandage wrapped around his arm to hasten the healing and an injured pride, and doesn’t think much of it at all. The next winter he will discover that it aches on the bitterest nights. The first time it happens he thinks it somehow hasn’t healed properly, and bursts with all the grace of a newborn polar dog into the healers’ tent in the dead of night only for them to tell him that it may ache like that for the rest of his life, and that there’s nothing they can do. He’s far more careful after that, double and triple checking all his knots even when he’s sneaking out of the village with Bato because they want to see the aurora for themselves. Bato teases him sometimes about being the youngest old man in the village, with achey bones before he even goes ice dodging for the first time. Hakoda, still with a few inches on his friend, pushes him into the nearest snowbank whenever he brings it up. 

Bato gets his payback two years later, when they’ve both gone away from the pole with their families - Bato on an extended fishing trip and Hakoda with his father on his first diplomatic visit to the North. On the boat back home Hakoda stands next to his father at the rudder and realizes with a jolt that he’s just shy of matching him in height. The chief ruffles his hair and estimates he’s gained at least another two inches over the summer, and Hakoda spends the rest of the journey waiting anxiously to lord his new height over Bato. He doesn’t consider the possibility that Bato’s own height isn’t fixed, and as a result trips over his own feet and barely misses faceplanting down the gangway when a boy comes sprinting down the dock and he realizes it’s _Bato,_ who’s shot up like a damn _weed_ and is now taller than Hakoda, Hakoda’s father, and his _own_ father, who comes strolling after at a more sedate pace. He also has a very familiar-looking wrapping around his forearm when he lifts a hand to wave at them, and grins at Hakoda when he comes to a goggling stop in front of him.

“Now we’ve both broken arms doing stupid things,” he says, and now Hakoda has to actually look _up_ to meet his eyes and the weird swooping feeling in his stomach is only the first of all the things wrong with that.

“Huh?” is the only thing Hakoda can get out. Bato looks at him oddly. 

“What? You’re looking at me like I’ve grown a fish head or something.” Hakoda flaps his hand between the two of them, trying to encompass the four or so inches that have put Bato almost an entire head taller than him. “Oh. Yeah, what do you know? I’m not the village short person anymore.”

“You - you - that’s not fair!” 

“Look, if it makes you feel any better, I also broke my arm falling off the boat because I sort of forgot how long my legs were.” Hakoda snorts out a laugh. When he looks up - and he doesn’t think that’ll ever stop being weird - and catches Bato in the middle of his own self-deprecating chuckle, he realizes abruptly that Bato _looks_ older, too, the last of the baby fat gone from his cheeks, and his high cheekbones look sharp enough to cut glass, and had his eyes always been that blue? 

He looks quickly away, thinking that perhaps these aren’t thoughts he’s meant to be thinking about his friend. Instead, he jabs an elbow into Bato’s ribs, and Bato tries to put him in a headlock, and then suddenly they’re scuffling on the docks just like always. Their fathers eventually come over to drag them away from each other and put them to work unloading the ships, but they wink conspiratorially at each other as they’re led away. 

Later that night, Bato meets Hakoda at the very end of the dock where Hakoda is already rigging a small canoe. With Bato at the rudder and Hakoda adjusting the sails, they maneuver their way out of the inlet that serves as their harbour and out onto the open water, the stars reflecting back at them over the expanse of black. They sail until the shoreline is a distant line of white on the horizon, then tie back the sails and let the boat drift. Bato pulls out the spare parkas he’d brought and they lie back on the bottom of the boat, shoulder to shoulder, and look up at the sky.

“You think we’ll have to go to war?” Hakoda asks eventually, turning his head to look at Bato in profile. “We’re men now, aren’t we? There’s kids up North that I met, our age, going off to fight.”

“I don’t know,” Bato replies. “I guess the war came to us, first.” 

“I think...at least our fathers, they’ll have to go. It’s worse than we know out there, Bato. Everyone is...scared, I think.”

“It’s quieter,” Bato agrees. “At the ports we stopped at, it was so strange.” They’re quiet for a while, except for the slap of the waves against the sides of the boat.

“Maybe the war will end. Before we need to go.”

“Maybe.”

Hakoda falls asleep to the gentle rocking of the waves, with Bato’s shoulder warm under his. He only wakes up when the boat bumps back against the docks, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes to see Bato smiling quietly down at him. 

“I didn’t want to wake you.” 

“More like you wanted to lord over me that you could sail the boat alone.” Hakoda grins and lets Bato pull him to his feet, leaning back into the boat to fold up the parkas.

“Hah.” Bato takes the parkas back from him and puts them under his arm, putting his free hand around Hakoda’s shoulders. “I missed you, Koda.”

“Sweet-talker,” Hakoda teases. Bato tugs playfully at his wolftail. “Fine, fine, I missed you too, I suppose.”

“I know you did.”

* * *

The war does not end. The diplomatic visits between the North and South dwindle, then stop, but the second to last ship that docks in the harbour disgorges, among others, a girl with warm blue eyes and an easy smile, and Hakoda immediately trips on nothing and faceplants into the snow. He lays there for a moment and shuts his eyes, wondering whether he could just melt away into a puddle. Bato is laughing at him in the background, but the sound stops abruptly and a second later, a gloved hand appears at the edge of Hakoda’s vision. 

“Hi,” says the girl, pulling him to his feet with alarming ease. “I’m Kya.”

“Uh,” he replies, still holding onto her forearm. “Oh, I’m, uh, Hakoda.”

“Well, ‘uh, Hakoda,’” Kya says, twisting their arms until she’s linked them firmly together and smirking at him. “Why don’t you show me around?” 

“If you insist,” he manages after a splutter, and mentally congratulates himself on stringing three words together. Bato winks at him as she whisks him away, and with her arm in his, he thinks the biting cold may not be so bad. 

And he’s right. She stays, even after the last ship from the North has disappeared over the horizon, and she rubs his arms when the cold sets in and never lets anyone tell her no and he can be as excitable or pensive or hyperbolic or _human_ around her as he wants, and she’ll just smile and hold him when he needs it and drag him, and Bato too, off on an adventure when he needs that. A year later they’re married under a midnight sun, and Hakoda thinks this is the happiest he’ll ever be. 

But the war is not over. The war will not be over for a long time, and the loss still ahead of him is unmeasurable by any metric he yet knows.

* * *

The first winter, after Kya, is the worst. It’s bitter cold, and the raids haven’t stopped, and Hakoda moves through the days like a wraith, feeling like he’ll never be warm again. He stares up at the ceiling at night, running his fingers over the old scar he’d gotten when he was twenty-two and thought he could conquer the world and was rather quickly proven wrong by a tenacious tiger seal in full view of the pretty girl from the North, and aches down to his bones. Everything reminds him of her, whether it’s seeing her in Katara’s face and Sokka’s eyes or when he walks through the village and sees her in every doorway or swearing he can hear her voice chattering away on the docks but when he races over to look there’s no one there. He tries to soothe Katara when she sobs herself to sleep and tries to stop Sokka as he retreats into himself but he’s no good at either one and he isn’t sure how long he can go on like this.

“Hakoda,” Bato says one day, following him into his igloo after a disaster of a fishing trip during which Hakoda had rigged the sail incorrectly not once but three times, a mistake he hasn’t made since he was first learning to sail, and to top it all off twisted his ankle tripping over a coil of rope left on the deck. “You have to stop doing this to yourself.”

“Go away, Bato,” Hakoda says, not turning around. He wants nothing more than to curl up on his bedroll and sleep, if only because it means he doesn’t need to think. “Please,” he adds, even though politeness is the furthest thing from his mind. 

“No. I know you think you don’t need help, but-”

“I don’t. And I don’t need your damn pity, either.” 

“Hakoda-”

“What do you want from me, then?” he snaps, whirling to face him. His leg buckles under him, and Bato catches him under the arms as he stumbles forwards. “Get off me.” Bato looks like he’s slapped him, but does release him, hovering as Hakoda sits heavily in the chair next to his bedroll. His arm hurts, and so does his ankle, and he feels like someone has reached into his chest with a spoon and scooped him empty. 

“I want to help,” Bato says gently, with far more patience than Hakoda deserves. 

“Why?” He doesn’t have the energy to fight anymore. “I’m weak. I can’t protect anyone. I don’t deserve chief, and you’ll just drag yourself down.”

“You’re grieving, Hakoda, not weak, and no one is looking down on you for it. You _loved_ her, and you have the right to grieve her.” He squats down in front of Hakoda and puts a hand on his shoulder, trying to make him meet his eyes. Hakoda looks away.

“I miss her,” he says finally, voice choked. “More than anything.” 

“I know,” Bato says, leaning forwards to envelop Hakoda in a hug. Hakoda gasps at the contact, and to his own surprise, begins to cry. Bato holds him through the worst of it, the wheezing sobs as his body fights to remember it knows how to breathe, not even flinching as Hakoda’s tears soak the fur lining of his parka. “I miss her too,” he says, when Hakoda is shaking through the last of it. 

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I couldn’t do better.”

“You did your best.”

That night, they sleep curled up together on Hakoda’s bedroll, just like they had in the bottom of that boat when they were just teenagers on the outskirts of a war. Hakoda wakes up with his face smushed into Bato’s collarbone, tear tracks dried into his cheeks, and manages a weak smile for the first time in what feels like months.

“Thank you,” he whispers, brushing a stray bit of hair out of Bato’s face before getting up to start getting ready for the day. He’ll still have days where he hurts so much that he can barely bear to get out of bed, days where he sees Kya around every corner, days where he looks at the kids and thinks he’s failing them, but there will always be help for him if he asks for it.

* * *

The raids are getting worse, and they haven’t heard from the men they’ve sent off to fight for months. When a letter arrives from the Earth Kingdom, marked with a royal seal, each member of the council Hakoda’s assembled in his igloo knows exactly what it means. 

“The Earth Kingdom requests naval aid,” Hakoda says anyway, and throws the letter down to flutter into the center of the circle, where they all stare at it like it might come alive and attack. “We must answer.”

He closes his eyes for a moment, and tries not to scream. He’d always known this day would come, when he, too, would have to march off to war. Now that it’s here, though, he realizes just how much he’d hoped it never would.

Bato comes to find him later, after the meeting has adjourned. He’s sitting on a snowbank a few hundred paces beyond the village boundaries, staring up at the sky and rubbing absently at his left arm.

“Koda,” he says quietly, the crunching of his boots in the snow audible over the whisper of the wind. 

“What am I doing, Bato?” Hakoda asks, looking bleakly up at him. “What kind of a father am I, leaving my children behind in the middle of a war? Sokka’s so _young,_ and he’ll be the only man in the village, and Katara, with no waterbending teacher left?”

“You’re doing your best,” Bato answers, taking a seat beside him and pulling his left arm, the one he’d broken what feels like eternities ago, towards him, starting to massage it where it’s gone stiff in the cold. Hakoda has the wild urge to yank it away and stalk out into the expanse of ice before them, walk all the way to the Fire Nation if he has to because this is all their fault. First they took his father, and then they took his wife, and now his children will have to spend years without a father and the rest of their lives without a mother, and - and it’s _his_ fault too. 

“I’m not!” he half-shouts, glaring at Bato when he refuses to relinquish his arm. “I haven’t defended the tribe, I can’t keep my own kids safe, I-” He sags back on the snowbank, all the bluster gone out of him in an instant. “I couldn’t save her. In my own house, and I couldn’t save her.” Even after all these years, it’s still all the same thoughts, the same regrets, and they’re all still a dagger in his chest. 

“What would’ve gone differently?” Bato asks, not unkindly. “What would’ve happened if you’d made it there in time?”

“I could’ve _saved her._ ” 

“Or you could’ve died, too. Hakoda, we can’t change the past. Only the present.” Hakoda sighs, long and tired, and drops his head sideways to rest against Bato’s shoulder. 

“I know,” he says. “I know, but I just wish. I wish things would’ve been different.”

“So do I.” Bato turns his head to rest his chin in Hakoda’s hair, and Hakoda remembers the way would bat him away when they were younger and Bato had just had his growth spurt, claiming he was ‘messing up his hair.’ “She’d be proud of you, I think. You, and the kids.”

“You think so?” 

“I know so.”

Hakoda tilts his chin up and presses a soft, chaste kiss to Bato’s mouth.

“What was that for?” Bato asks, looking bemused. Hakoda smiles.

“We’re going to war, Bato. If I - I needed you to know.”

“Well, in that case,” Bato says, and pulls him back in.

Later that night, he looks up at the roof of the igloo above while Bato snores next to him and wonders if she can see him now. Wonders if she approves. 

He thinks she would.

Tomorrow they go to war, and everything will change. How many of them will return, and how many will be lost to the annals of the history books, he doesn’t know. And even though the thought of losing one more person he loves makes his throat close up in terror, maybe, maybe, with Bato by his side, they might just survive this.

**Author's Note:**

> written for day 2 of [bakoda fleet week](https://bakodafleetweek.tumblr.com) for the _old wounds | young_ prompts. this one was...yeah, more angsty, but you know, there's a war on. comments/kudos would make my day <3
> 
> on [tumblr](https://acezukos.tumblr.com)


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